The Presses No Longer Roll In The Electric City

( Publisher’s Note: This week’s issue of the Northern Plains Independent is the first issue being printed at the

Helena Independent-Record.

The move was made after the Gannett corporation made the decision to shut down the press shop at the Great Falls Tribune, where we’ve printed since our first issue rolled off the presses in May 2019. Our deadlines are a little earlier and we’ll have less flexibility to being able to place last-minute ads and news. We should, however, still be able maintain our distribution schedule with subscriber copies going to the post office Wednesday afternoon and newsstand copies available Wednesday as well. This article is reprinted by permission.) On Sunday, July 12, I got a call from the Great Falls Tribune.

“We’ve got four plates left.” That mean that I did not have much time to get to Great Falls before the last Tribune to roll off the press in Great Falls would be running.

I was a few minutes late. They held the press. It’s a pressman thing that most would never understand.

I had asked to document the last run of the Tribune press. As I put it, “this is a story a pressman needs to tell.” I got the go-ahead to be on the floor for that final run.

There was a small crowd on hand. Other Tribune employees, former employees and family members.

In the old days of Vaudeville, when you reached the pinnacle you were said to have “played the palace.” In newspaper printing, the equivalent was becoming a “Metro” pressman.

When I was a kid, my dad, a newspaper pressman, would take me over to Memphis to watch the Commercial Appeal come off the presses. The Appeal had many presses in their building. There were long-gone press brands: Hoe, Wood and Goss, which still survives… in China. Those letterpresses where the same size as the Metro, but used the old letterpress printing technology. I can still hear those old presses and feel the vibrations of the floor as the presses came to full speed.

The Tribune’s Metro had the same sound. Power. “Don’t mess with me.” I knew that the press run would be short, so I concentrated on shooting the photos.

Funny thing, though, when taking photos you notice only what you see in the viewfinder. You don’t see the big picture.

After the run was over, I had the Tribune press crew sign a front page of one of the last of the Great Falls Tribune to come off the press, and then I shot the group photo that ran in last week’s Sun Times. The photo and front page will be framed and hung on my office wall.

When I left the press floor, I went down the stairs into the reel-room where the rolls of paper are stored and fed into the press above. It was dark and I was the only one on the floor. I shot some more photos and stood back and took in the view — without the camera. Then it all came into focus.

I was in the reel-room of a newspaper press that had made its last run of that newspaper. I stood in the reelroom where many a “Gypsy Printer” like myself had gotten their start. It was where, for many pressmen, where their career began. Now, the life of this press was nearing its end. The Metro at Great Falls was well cared for, even pampered. It was installed at a time when a new press was a bold statement for a newspaper. Newspapers would show off the presses, many even built large windows so passersby could see the big presses in action.

Now there is not much need for such presses.

The Metro was never intended to produce the color quality expected of newspapers today. Yet the Metro and the crew at the Great Falls Tribune produced the best newspaper in the state for print quality. That was because of the crew and the attention Gannett paid to quality production. When every other paper was satisfied with black and white, Gannett and USA Today made leaps in production quality that set the standard for newspapers around the world. But it always comes down to the crew on the press.

Now most people think that the thirty-dash (“-30-”, the “end of the story”) of the Tribune’s Mighty Metro was written that Sunday night when the last Trib was produced along the banks of the Missouri River. No, the Metro had a little more to say.

On Tuesday, July 14, the Metro bade a fitting farewell to a long career by printing two weekly community newspapers. The Northern Plains Independent of Wolf Point was the first newspaper to go onto the Metro on Tuesday, followed by the Culbertson Community News.

The Culbertson newspaper has the distinction of being the last newspaper printed in Great Falls.

But as Paul Harvey used to say, here’s “the rest of the story.” There are only a handful of daily newspapers in Montana. Most Montanans get their news from locally owned, community oriented weekly publications.

A great number of those newspapers were produced in the Great Falls Tribune building. No, not on the Tribune press, but at River’s Edge Press. River’s Edge Press, or REP, was a press that was installed in 2004 in a corner of the paper storage area used for the newspaper for the Tribune press.

It used a Goss Community style of press, much smaller than the Tribune’s Metro, but the REP press could run a much wider range of products. The Tribune press could only run one size of paper. The Community could handle any width of paper from 35” wide to 11” wide. It was the perfect printing press for producing newspapers, inserts and magazine-sized products.

The REP press used to produce the magazine for the Montana Electric Co-Operatives. It used to produce the inserts for North 40. On Tuesday, the Cascade Courier, Seeley-Swan Pathfinder, Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, Fort Peck Journal, Daniels County Leader, Phillipsburg Mail and others came off the Community press.

The Sun Times printed at REP from about 2009 until 2018. We did not want to leave, but we knew the end was near and wanted to secure out position with another printer. We made our move to the Livingston Enterprise.

We stayed in touch with the crew at REP. I would invite our REP customer service representative, Amy Thomas, to lunch to talk about printing, yet she always ended up buying lunch.

Before the Metro made its final runs, the Community press at REP had wrapped up its day, and its duty as a newspaper press. The last newspaper to come off the Community was the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch of Lincoln. When it cranked up for the last run, I pulled out my cell phone and shot a video so I could broadcast the last run live.

Of being the last newspaper produced at River’s Edge Press, Dispatch publisher Roger Dey told the Sun Times, “From a historical standpoint, being the last newspaper to print there does make us something of an interesting footnote in the story of newspaper printing in Montana. It’s a shame to see Gannett shutting down their own on-site printing and abandoning River’s Edge, since it was used by so many weekly newspapers.” Dey continued, “The fact that the last newspapers off both the presses in Great Falls were small, locally owned publications speaks to the value readers in smaller communities place on those newspapers, and the fact that not everyone is able to, or even wants to, make the switch to online news. Even though the shift toward online seems inexorable, I think readers in particular really like to support their local newspapers.” According to Dey, “A recent survey we did of our readers showed that a lot of people still like to pick up and read a hard copy newspaper, and that they pay more attention to both the stories and the advertisements in print than they do online. Not to mention, for a lot of towns weekly newspapers are the primary source for truly local news, particularly since the larger daily newspapers have shrunk their newsrooms and coverage almost as fast as they have their delivery areas.”

Darla Downs, former publisher of The Herald-News in Wolf Point and The Searchlight in Culbertson told the

Sun Times, “I switched to printing in Great Falls about 15 years ago. When I started the Northern Plains Independent (Wolf Point) and the

Community News (Culbertson) in May 2019, the Great Falls Tribune was my first call to get a time slot for printing my new papers. Over the years, the staff in Great Falls were great to work with and extremely helpful.”

Downs continued, “I’m disappointed by the corporate decision to silence the presses in Great Falls. For now, we will print in Helena. However, there are enough challenges each week when publishing two rural weekly newspapers without the added worry of how far the finished product has to travel before we can get the newspapers into the hands of our readers.”

Of the people that ran the presses that produced the newspapers, a few are moving on to other ventures. Some, I could tell, would like to stay “on the press,” but are not sure what opportunities are as the daily papers continue to lose readers and advertisers. Some, like REP’s Thomas just want to take a breather then see what comes next.

I ended up spending about eight hours on the pressroom floor on Tuesday. I realized how much I missed running a press. Many at the Tribune and River’s Edge will feel the same after a while.

Once ink is in your blood, it is there to stay.